Assignments 
Readings and Class Schedule
Please note that assigned readings should be completed before the precept meeting.
Week 1 (February 3, 5)
Introduction: From the Voyages of Discovery to the Science of Life
(guest lecture by Dr. Jordan Kellman 2/5)
Precept meetings are not held this week.
William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, 1977), Chapter 1, "Biology," [Reader].
Supplemental: Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, and 8.
Week 2 (February 10, 12)
Enlightenment towards Biology: Natural History and Classification
Carl von Linné, "Police of Nature," 1760. [Reader]
J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809), trans. Hugh Elliot (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1984), pp. 19-28, 56-67. [Reader]
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970, 1994), "Preface," pp. xv-xxiv. [Reader]
Lisbet Koerner, "Carl Linnaeus in his Time and Place," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 145-162. [Reader]
Peter J. Bowler, "Nature and the Enlightenment," Chapter 5 of The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), pp. 139-192. [Reader]Reading Response Questions, Weeks 1-2
Week 3 (February 17, 19)
Animal Electricity and the Organism as Machine
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1817. (Concentrate on chapters 3-5.)
Reading Response Questions, Week 3
Julien de la Mettrie, "Man a Machine," trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994, first published 1748), pp. 54-71. [Reader]
Justus Liebig, "Preface," "Organic Chemistry Applied to Physiology and Pathology," Animal Chemistry (Cambridge: John Owen, 1842), pp. xxv-xxxv, 1-17, 38-49. [Reader]
Walter Wetzels, "Johann Wilhelm Ritter: Romantic Physics in Germany," Romanticism and the Sciences, edited by Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp 199-212. [Reader]
William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapter 6, "Function: The Animal Machine," pp. 118-154. [Reader]
Week 4 (February 24, 26) )
Life and Matter: Spontaneous Generation and Cell Theory
Theodor Schwann, "Author's Preface," "Introduction," and "Theory of the Cells," from Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants, translated by Henry Smith (London: Syndenham Society, 1839, reprinted by Kraus Reprint Co., New York, 1969), pp. ix-xx, 1-9, 186-215. [Reader]
Philip R. Sloan, "Organic Molecules Revisited,"Buffon 88 (Paris : J. Vrin ; Lyon: Institut interdisciplinaire d'etudes epistemologiques, 1992), pp. 415-438. [Reader]
John Farley and Gerald Geison, "Science, Politics and Spontaneous Generation in Nineteenth-Century France: The Pasteur-Pouchet Debate," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 48 (1974): 161-198. [Reader]
William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapter 2 "Form: Cell Theory," pp. 16-34. [Reader]Reading Response Questions, Week 4
Week 5 (March 3, 5)
The Politics of Evolution: Transmutation, Darwin, and Natural Selection
Robert Chambers, "Hypothesis of the Development of the Vegetable and Animal Kingdoms," Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (New York: Humanities Press, 1969, first published 1844), pp. 191-235. [Reader]
Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn, editors, Charles Darwin, selections from On the Origin of Species, Chapter 8 of On Evolution (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 156-215.
James Secord, "Introduction," Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, by Robert Chambers, edited by James Secord (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. ix-xxxii, xxxviii-xlv. [Reader]
Frank Sulloway, "Darwin and the Galapagos," Biol. Journ. Linn. Soc. 21 (1984): 29-59. [Reader]
Adrian Desmond, "Lamarckism and Democracy: Corporations, Corruption and Comparative Anatomy in the 1830s," History, Humanity, and Evolution, edited by James R. Moore (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 99-130. [Reader]Supplemental: William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapters 4 and 5, " Transformation" and "Man," pp. 57-117. [Reserve]
Reading Response Questions, Week 5
Video 3/5 BBC The Devil's Chaplain
Week 6 (March 10, 12)
Positivism and the Experimental Ideal in Biology Note: Precept meetings are not held this week of mid-term exams.
Claude Bernard, "Observation and Experiment" and "Experimental Considerations Peculiar to Living Beings," An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry C. Greene (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), pp. 5-26, 87-105. [Reader]
Auguste Comte, excerpts of Chapters 1, 2, and 5, The First System: Cours de Philosophie Positive (Paris, 1830-42), translated by Harriet Martineau and first published in 1853, reprinted in Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings, edited by Gertrud Lenzer (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 71-75, 96-101, 163-171. [Reader]
William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapter 7 "The Experimental Ideal," pp. 154-166. [Reader]Supplemental: Garland Allen, Life Science in The Twentieth Century(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), Chapter 1 "The Influence of Darwinian Thought on Late Nineteenth-Century Biology," pp. 1-19. [Reserve]
Midterm exam March 12
Spring Break (March 17, 19)
Week 7 (March 24, 26)
Development, Evolution, and Race, 1890-1940: Hereditarianism, Embryology, Eugenics, Genetics, and the New Synthesis
Francis Galton, "Eugenics, Its Definition, Scope and Aims," Essays in Eugenics (1909), pp. 35-43. [Reader]
Herbert Spencer Jennings, "Heredity and Environment," The Scientific Monthly 19(1924): 226-238. [Reader]
Garland Allen, Life Science in The Twentieth Century, Chapters II, III, and VI, "Revolt from Morphology I: The Origins of Experimental Embryology," "Revolt from Morphology II: Heredity and Evolution," and " The Convergence of Disciplines: Embryology, Genetics and Evolution, 1915-1960," pp. 21-72, 126-145. [Reader]Supplemental: Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995). [Reserve]
Stephen Jay Gould, "The Hereditarian Theory of IQ: An American Invention," Chapter 5, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981), pp. 146-233.Reading Response Questions, Week 7
Week 8 (March 31, April 2)
Controlling Life: Reproductive Biology, Mechanistic Reductionism, and Ecological Science
Jacques Loeb, The Mechanistic Conception of Life(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912), pp. 3-31. [Reader]
Paul De Kruif, "Jacques Loeb, the Mechanist," Harper's Magazine 146 (1923): 182-190. [Reader]
Eugenius Warming, "Introduction" and "Struggle Between Plant-Communities," Oecology of Plants, An Introduction to the Study of Plant-Communities, translated by Percy Groom and Isaac B. Balfour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 1-15, 348-373. [Reader]
Merriley Borell, "Biologists and the Promotion of Birth Control Research, 1918-1938," J. Hist. Biol.20 (1987): 51-87. [Reader]
Donald Worster, "Words on a Map" and "Clements and the Climax Community," Chapters 10 and 11 of Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 190-220. [Reader]
Garland Allen, Life Science in The Twentieth Century, Chapter IV "Mechanistic Materialism and Its Metamorphosis: General Physiology, 1900-1930," pp. 73-88, 93, 95-111. [Reader]Reading Response Questions, Week 8
Week 9 (April 7, 9)
World War II to Cold War Science I. Field Science: Primatology, the Green Revolution, and the Impact of Environmentalism
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), selections to be announced.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, "Raising Darwin's Consciousness," still need citation.
Linda J. Lear, "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring," Environmental History Review 17: 2 (1993): pp. 23-48. [Reader]
Deborah Fitzgerald, "Exporting American Agriculture," Social Studies of Science 16 (1986): 457-83. [Reader]
J. E. de Steigneur, Age of Environmentalism(McGraw-Hill, 1997), Chapter 2, "Post-World War II Socio-Economic Conditions," and Chapter 3, "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring," pp. 19-41.
Donna Haraway, "Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body, Part II: The Past is Contested Zone," Feminism and Science, eds. Evelyn Fox Keller and Helen E. Longino (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 57-72. [Reader]Supplemental: J. E. de Steigneur, other chapters from Age of Environmentalism, esp. Chapter 1, "Foundations of Environmental Thought," Chapter 7, "Lynn White and 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,'" and Chapter 8, "Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb."
Video April 7 or 9 Donna Haraway, The National Geographies of Primates and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, PBS 1993
Reading Response Questions, Week 9
Week 10 (Apr. 14, 16)
World War II to Cold War Science II. Genetics: The Lysenko Affair, the Expansion of Biomedical Research in the U.S. and the Transnational Molecularization of Biology
James Watson, The Double Helix, 1968.
Gunther Stent, "Introduction: Waiting for the Paradox," and Max Delbrück, "A Physicist Looks at Biology (1949)," Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology, edited by John Cairns, Gunther S. Stent, and James D. Watson (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of Quantitative Biology Press, 1966), pp. 3-22. [Reader]
J. D. Bernal, "The Role of Science in the U.S.S.R.," and J. B. S. Haldane, "Freedom in Soviet Science," Understanding the Russians: A Study of Soviet Life and Culture (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1947), pp. 92-95, 103-107. [Reader]
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, "The Problem of Lysenkoism," The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. pp. 163-196. [Reader]
Garland Allen, "The Origin and Development of Molecular Biology," Chapter VII, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), pp. 187-228. [Reserve]Movie 4/16 The Race to the Double Helix, BBC 1987,
Reading Response Questions, Week 10
Week 11 (April 21, 23)
Selfish Genes and Postmodern Bodies: Sociobiology and Biology in Society
Richard Dawkins, "Why Are People?" and "The Replicators" from The Selfish Gene (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989), pp. 1-20. [Reader]
E. O. Wilson, "The Molecular Wars," Naturalist (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1994), pp. 218-237. [Reader]
W. R. Albury, "Politics and Rhetoric in the Sociobiology Debate," Soc. Stud. Sci. 10 (1980): 519-36. [Reader]
Donna Haraway, "The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune Systems Discourse," Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 203-230. [Reader]
Richard Lewontin, "A Reasonable Skepticism" and "All in Our Genes?," Biology as Ideology (HarperPerennial 1991).Paper due 4/24 by 3 p.m. History Dept. Office (129 Dickinson)
Reading Response Questions, Week 11
Week 12 (Apr. 28, 30)
Engineering Life: The Human Genome Project and Biotechnologies
Paul Berg et al., "Potential Hazards of Recombinant DNA Molecules," Science 185 (July 26, 1974): 303. [Reader]
Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., "Sequences and Consequences of the Human Genome," editorial, Science 246 (13 October 1989): 189. [Reader]
Walter Gilbert, "A Vision of the Grail," The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project, edited by Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 83-97. [Reader]
Leroy Hood, "Biology and Medicine in the Twenty-First Century," The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues i n the Human Genome Project, edited by Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 136-163. [Reader]
Susan Wright, "Recombinant DNA Technology and Its Social Transformation, 1972-1982," Osiris 2 (1986): 303-360. [Reader]
Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald, "The Eugenics of Normalcy: The Politics of Gene Research," The Ecologist 23, No. 5 (1993): 185-191. [Reader]
Richard Lewontin, "The Dream of the Human Genome," Biology as Ideology (HarperPerennial 1991).Video 4/30 from Smithson's Science in American Life, on the Cambridge hearings over the safety of rec DNA, 1975
Reading Response Questions, Week 12
